We are in a major economic crisis. One person who has seen the effects of this is Daryl Foriest. He is the director of the Community Kitchen and Food Pantry of West Harlem, a branch of the organisation Food Bank for New York City, which provides food and social services for the working poor and homeless. He talked about “the new poverty”:
Daryl Foriest (Standard/African American accent): Although the economy is moving in a positive direction, so much damage was done and it takes so much just to take that first step and to get back on your feet. You want to get an apartment, you have to have a month’s security, two months’ rent. These clients don’t have the means to come up with these funds, you know, at one time. And then the jobs, we have a lot of clients who are qualified with degrees, but who are taking jobs for less pay now because they’ve given up looking for what they went to school for, and what they have a skill, or they went to trade school, and these jobs are not available, so they’re taking jobs that are like $10, $12 less an hour that (than) they normally would make. So now you want to have the same lifestyle and live in an apartment and be able to eat and be able to get medication and take care of your family, but you’re doing it, making $10, $12 less an hour, you know, hundreds of dollars less a week and probably about $1,000 less a month, and that extra money would normally go to rent. So now you have fathers who are working two or three jobs, not even spending time with their family, just trying to make what they would make normally with the one job they had. We have single mothers who are bringing their kids out in the middle of winter, in the middle of blizzards, just to get food, just so they can have food, so they can go to school without a hungry belly.
Things have certainly changed:
Daryl Foriest: Years ago there was a time when there was a such (such a) thing as a middle class, when people can get a pay check and have money taken out for 401(k), and also have money for savings, they can invest in their kids’ college tuition, college education. Right now we – and even myself – we’re working just to keep a roof over our head and keep the basic staples of life intact. So there’s no room for saving, there’s no room to try to get our kids the best possible education. All we can do is hope.
But there doesn’t seem to be a lot of hope at the moment:
Daryl Foriest: I dream of the day when I could pull these gates down forever and start a new career. And what I mean by that is the day that (there) is no longer a need for the food bank, means hunger is over. One thing I do know is that we’re one of the wealthiest and most resourceful countries in the world, we are America, we’re the United States of America. There should be no hunger, there should be no homelessness in a nation like this. At the end of the day I understand politics and policies and federal funds, but when you work on the frontline like I do every day and you see children outside with no shoes who haven’t seen their mom and dad in days because their parents may be on a drug binge, or you see a single mother toting five kids, to just try to get them a meal, or you see a single father who lost his wife to breast cancer, it’s hard to stomach.
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